53 sessions in. Live product. No spaghetti. Here is what actually keeps a vibe coded project from falling apart. AI adds fast and never refactors. Every session it layers on top of whatever exists. Structure debt compounds invisibly until touching one thing breaks three others. That is not a vibe coding problem. That is an architecture ownership problem. Three things that kept it clean: One change at a time. Smoke test after every deploy. Two site outages taught us this the hard way. A living spec document. Claude Code reads it before every session. No drift. No re-explaining decisions made three weeks ago. The builder owns the architecture. Always. The AI executes inside it. The speed came from the AI. The structure stayed ours. What is the biggest mistake you have made letting AI drive a build?

Upgraded to the $100 plan thinking I had headroom. Started using Claude Opus 4.7 (new last week) heavily for a real build. Parallel sessions, long context windows, deep reasoning tasks. Hit 75% of my monthly limit in 2.5 days. Never came close before. 7 day reset cycle. Math is not mathing. This is the tax on actually building with AI versus dabbling with it. The people who use it hardest pay the most and hit limits the fastest. Not complaining, just noting: the cost structure of serious AI development is still being figured out by everyone including the people selling it. Back to Opus 4.6 which worked fine. Anyone else burning through limits faster than expected this week?